We are strange
creatures. We can be so inconsistent. Take the matter of buying and selling. We
know perfectly well that in order to buy anything we must pay for it. The very
word "buying" means that we pay whatever an item costs and only then have a
right to possess it. In fact, taking something that belongs to someone else
without paying is stealing. We may complain about inflation and shop around to
get an article of clothing or food or a piece of equipment or furniture at a
lower price, but we assume without a second thought that to obtain what someone
else has that we need or want, we have to pay whatever the owner asks for what
we wish to buy.Then we turn to the order of spirit and the supernatural
world of God and His grace. All of a sudden we seem to change our minds. We know
better, of course. But we have to struggle to overcome the peculiar idea that
where God is concerned He owes us what we need and that we somehow have a right
to what only He can give without bothering to pay for what we want.
Inconsistent? It's contradictory! The phrase goes, "You get nothing for
nothing." How come some people have a different idea about God? They seem to
expect Him to give everything for nothing.

There is, we may admit, some
basis for our strange attitude. After all, God brought us out of nothing into
existence, without our paying anything for the privilege of creation. He might,
in fact, have made us any one of the million other creatures, like a rose, or a
lily, or a lowly weed. And, even then, had we been grasshoppers who could speak,
we should still have told God, "Thank You." Yet, God made us and made us what we
are not only without cost on our part, but even without the possibility of any
contribution from us. For the best of reasons, we were not around to offer
advanced payment for our future existence. And so on through life. There are so
many things we possess and enjoy that God gives us and does not demand so many
hours of labor or so much effort in return for what we receive.God’s
goodness, therefore, can be taken for granted. What we get used to we think we
have a right to. What we've always enjoyed we think we have a claim to. So we
can mistakenly assume that because God has given us so much without cost to
ourselves - after all, it's God, you know, God - He just gives and keeps giving,
and He will give us not only in time, but He will even give us eternity with no
exertion from us.

Faith and reason tell us this is not true. No doubt God
is loving, and in fact His name is love. but this same God is also just. He is,
let us keep telling ourselves, the Creator and Lord of the Universe. His very-
outpouring of love, we would expect, must call for some requital from our side.
We are not robots or mannequins. We are not irrational vegetables or beasts. We
are human beings with a free will, and what pray tell do we have a free will
for, if not to use it?Part of our freedom is the sublime but awful power we
have to say "yes." and can you imagine, to say "no" to God. God wants us to use
this power of freedom, and as the Scriptures make so clear, depending on how we
use this freedom we shall finally be saved or lost.Our purpose in this
article, however, is more refined. We shall concentrate on only one aspect of
God's expectations of us free human beings, namely, that if we wish to love God
as He wants to be loved and thereby merit his fruitful love in return, we must
pay the price that this demands.Even among ourselves we know that the true
love of friendship is demanding. Of those we love and who love us we expect much
and they expect much of us. When people are in love they ask from one another
what they would never think of asking from a stranger. "I hate to ask her. I
don't really know her well enough."So true is this that two people who are
afraid to ask of each other what they respectively need or want, for fear of
seeming to impose well, they may respect one another and have a high regard for
one another, but they are not selflessly in love. What holds true in the order
of nature is equally and eminently true in the order of grace. It is precisely
because God loves us so much that He expects us to love Him in return. And the
price of being loved by the Almighty is high, as also is the price of growing in
His love. The more precious the commodity, the higher the price; the most
precious possession in the world is the love of God. You don't get this, I don't
say for nothing or cheaply; you pay, and you pay dearly.Can we be more
specific? What does God expect of us who claim that we love Him as recompense
for His prior goodness to us and as the wages, so to speak, to merit an increase
of His bounty on our behalf? He finally expects these two things:

That we are willing to give up whatever pleasant things He may
want us to surrender.

That we are willing to take whatever painful
things He may want to send us.Between these two, surrender and suffering, or
as I prefer, sacrifice and the cross, lies the whole price range of divine love.
Go where you will, seek where you will, consult whom you will. Pray, read,
speculate and meditate as much as you will, you will always come back to this
fact of the spiritual life and there are no exceptions. The love of God is paid
for as Christ paid for the love of His Father with the hard currency of willing
sacrifice and the holy cross.When I was younger, and I thought, smarter, I
didn't talk quite this way. But experience is a good, though costly,
teacher.First, then, sacrifice.

Sacrifice is not quite the same as
the cross, although they have much in common. When I endure the cross I am ready
to accept whatever unpleasant things God in His love wants me to endure and God
can be uncanny in what crosses He can send us. Sometimes we think it takes a
divine imagination to conjure up the varieties, large and small, different sizes
and shapes, of the cross. On the other hand, when I sacrifice I'm rather giving
up pleasant things that I already enjoy.The variety of these pleasant things
that God's love may ask me to give up is all but infinite and they will differ
with different people. Much will depend on what we as individuals already have.
Some have one thing, others have another. What one person has is dear to him.
What another person has will be dear to her. Some people have one thing, say,
money. Others have something else, say leisure, or privacy or independence (I
make sure I have none of these things) or successful business, or a good
professional practice, or prestige or authority or any one of the thousand
amenities that no one naturally wants to give up. And the strange thing about
not wanting to give up is that even when the person has rationally convinced
himself, "This is not a good thing," like smoking or drinking, yet once a thing
becomes part of us, giving it up is like cutting off an arm.But there are
certain things that everyone considers precious no matter who he or she is,
whether young or old, rich or poor, bishop, priest, religious or layperson.
These things are the common source of sacrifice that God will certainly ask of
all of us to prove that we love Him and to pray for growth in His love. I would
single out especially the following: time, convenience, customary habits and
personal opinions and our own preferred way of doing things.

If we are to
love God the way He wants us to we must be willing to sacrifice our time. It
takes time to pray. It takes time to do some daily spiritual reading. It takes
time to visit the sick or the shut-ins at home or in hospitals. It takes time to
help some aged person with shopping or tidying up their house. My secretary in
New York who was dying of terminal cancer found it very hard to find anyone to
help her cook her meals; and she was willing to pay. People just don't have the
time.It takes time to write letters, answer the telephone, especially with
some people, or do some necessary repairs around the house. It takes time to
listen to a person tell his story of misfortune or sit perhaps for hours on a
bus or train to pay one's respects to a relative or friend.If we are to love
God the way He wants us to we must be willing to sacrifice our convenience. It
is not convenient to get up early in the morning to attend Mass and receive Holy
Communion, You would think after all these years of getting up we couldn't wait,
what a strange expression, to get up in the morning. It is not convenient to go
out of my way to perform some favor that I know would be appreciated. It is not
convenient to miss one's meal in order to be available when I am needed or to
miss a radio or television program because I am on an errand of mercy. I have
long ago decided, I don't have a right to three meals a day. It is not
convenient to kneel when sitting is so much more comfortable, or to be satisfied
with less food or some delicacy in order to share with someone who would enjoy
what I give up.

If we are to love God the way He wants us to we must be
willing to sacrifice our customary habits. The way we've been doing things
perhaps for years can make us addicted to patterns of life that more than once
may have to be broken if we are to serve the Lord and love Him, as He tells us,
with all our strength. This, I believe, is one reason why so many marriages do
not succeed. Husband and wife or both simply do not want to give up their
customary ways of behavior before they were married. She wants her freedom and
he wants his-the kind they had when they were still single. No marriage can
succeed on these impossible terms. If we are to love God the way He wants us to
we must be willing to sacrifice our personal opinions and ideas and way's of
doing things. Why do people argue? In most cases because one or both parties in
the argument are wedded to their own judgment. They are unwilling to yield in
conversation or where they’re given employment, or as I know among religious, in
obedience to a superior. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. She doesn't
know what she's talking about.” Maybe she doesn't, so I make a representation.
She insists, so what do I do? It all depends on how much behind the superior I
love God, who faith tells me is giving me this opportunity to prove my
love.

To say that the sacrifice of our own ideas and way's calls for
humility is only to restate what must be a spectacle to the angels. The Church's
authority tells the faithful to accept her teaching and her directives on
pre-marital chastity, on priestly celibacy, on chastity in marriage by not
interfering with the life process, on the value of confession for children, on
the strict and very rare conditions for general absolution. on the vestments
that a priest is to wear at Mass, or the recitation of the Divine Office by
those in priestly orders, on the rubrics to be observed in the Eucharistic
Liturgy, on the whole gamut of Catholic doctrine like the papal primacy, the
Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and the meaning of sin. I said
when the angels see what's going on on earth it's a spectacle. I don't quite
know what I am saying, but I am sure the angels must weep at the lack of
humility as a result of which those whom God has called, even to His deepest
intimacy, fail in loving Him. They reverse the prayer of Jesus in the Garden,
"Not your will, but mine be done"-and they mean it, they really mean it. I've
reasoned, I've argued, given people every possible cogent reason for not
insisting on something which the Church said was wrong. "Don't you see that the
Church insists: 'You may not do this, you may not teach this'?" But they have a
reason and the reason is their will. In the bible of Satan the first verse
reads: "in the beginning was the deed. And the deed was contrary to the will of
God; and God was left to take the consequences.

The
Cross

The cross, we said, is in one sense already a sacrifice and
every sacrifice includes the cross. But properly speaking the cross is something
different. When God's love sends us the cross He enters our lives, as it were,
unbidden. He does something to us-what a blessed preposition-He does something
to us that we do not naturally like. He causes us some pain and as you know pain
is anything we do not like. The most philosophical definition of pain is: what
the human will does not like. And then God watches how we accept the suffering
that this brings. The pain may be physical, like some infirmity or ravaging
disease: it may be social, like the estrangement from someone we really love; it
may be emotional, like an unjust accusation never rectified or undeserved
criticism for something someone else had done; it may he psychological pain,
like dryness of spirit, confusion of mind or a despondency that we seem unable
to shake off; it may be spiritual pain, like darkness in prayer or a siege of
scrupulosity or loss of that clarity of faith that we used to have. No matter.
God who is master of His gifts has the right to take them away. He can take away
the precious things; He can also impose the painful things. And let's never,
unlike Job, fail to bless the same God.

Some
implications:

As we look over what we have said about sacrifice
and the cross we may be frightened, and little wonder! None of us naturally
likes to surrender what we like: it's almost too obvious for words. And none of
us is naturally drawn to pain. But just here is the difference between nature
and grace. What nature fears grace can actually learn to desire; and what nature
runs away from, grace-would you believe it-can make us seek. This is where we
need the wisdom of the saints.St. Ignatius did not write much on the
spiritual life. His vocabulary was very limited but what he said is worth
quoting. I quote from my father in God: "If God gives you an abundant harvest of
trials, it is a sign of the great holiness to which He desires you to attain. Do
you want to become a great saint? Ask God to send you many sufferings. The flame
of divine love never rises higher than when fed with the wood of the cross which
the infinite charity of the Savior uses to finish His sacrifice. All the
pleasures of the world are nothing compared with the sweetness found in the gall
and vinegar offered to Jesus Christ, that is, hard and painful things endured
for Jesus Christ and with Jesus Christ. Suffering endured for the love of Jesus
Christ should be reckoned among God's greatest benefits."

The trouble
with quotations like this from the mystics is that we are liable to think they
were unlike ourselves. Not so. They shrank from sacrifice and the cross as much
as we do. But here precisely is the secret of sanctity. It is possible, through
divine grace, for the love of God to reach a degree in our hearts where we
experience joy in suffering. Honest, really and it is a taste of this joy which
the Savior promised to all who sincerely strive to become like Him by embracing
what He embraced-the cross-He, out of love for His Father; we, out of love for
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The cost of loving God is high but God comes
through. He rewards the price we pay with an experience of His presence, a sense
of His intimacy, and a joy, that the saints tell us, is so sweet they would not
exchange their sufferings for all the pleasures in the world. Let's ask our
Savior to not just listen or hear what those who have learned to love God tell
us but to teach us from experience that this great wisdom is
true.